


Day 1

by Amemait



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: GFY, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-10
Updated: 2013-07-10
Packaged: 2017-12-18 08:06:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/877511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amemait/pseuds/Amemait





	Day 1

He dreams he has a different face.

This is not altogether unsurprising, for this is not the first time he has had this dram.

The skin feels stretched and unnatural across a higher brow, the DNA (but what is DNA?) mutating (changing, shifting, what is it that changed? because he is still himself, is he not?) and the only constant is the clothes on his back.

But that only happens in one place in his dreams.

He dreams in complexities, in acronyms that mean home (acronym?), of love and of apathy, of strange creatures (Cyber, another word, another meaning without context and so is meaningless still) and he wants to remember all of it, because it's all so incredibly important, and he just. Simply. Cannot. He wakes up and names slip from his mind (the women, the men, the strange creatures who choose to make his psyche - another word - their own).

He dreams of his friend split in two; one the face he knows and the other a face he doesn't, but knows that both are safe.

His dreams are rarely peaceful; there is war and death and destruction in them, but the wars do not touch his own people, the deaths are not theirs, the destruction prevented from becoming too great, and all this makes the dreams bearable and acknowledgable as the dreams that he feels they should be; they are too vivid to be mere dreams, he knows, and he shudders.

He gives one man a name because while there is a title (and he struggles even now to think it, even in the dreams he cannot recall the title alone), there is no name to go with it.

But yes there is; a strange man, he is called Doctor, and is that the title that eludes him? He cannot say.

There is a box with a thousand rooms in it, and one of them is his; as lavish as a king's, he imagines to himself. His clothes are always warm, and his skin does not scratch and crawl with poorly-woven material or the bugs to infest (bugs are part of life!) them.

The sky is full of flying metal creatures, and he knows that he is sick with them.

He does not know how he survived the battle. No, he does. He ran. He ran with tears in his eyes and he knew, he _knew_ beyond all reasonable ken, that his people would die and they would lose, so what difference did one person matter?

And he hated himself for the ken of it, just as they hated him in turn.

He wears a different face in his dreams, and has a different ken and a different clan. His kin are not kin, but kin they are.

Battle of Culloden, it was called. A culling of the den, it felt.

And a mere piper ran from that battle with tears in his eyes and did not raise a hand to the knife.

He had wanted to fight, but something in him had said that he would meet his end that day if he entered the fray.

Shame it was, that he could not bear the thought of dying there.

He dreams of worlds and times and rooms without end (they have ended, they are at an end, he is here and in the now), of spinning stars (they do not twinkle), the ember-burn-glow of friendship upon his heart (the title-name-man has two hearts; perhaps for twice the friends?), and a never-ending delight,

But these are, after all, just dreams.


End file.
